Video: BLU Lesson 4: What I learnt as International Czar by David Gurteen

One of six BLU lessons on what I learnt about knowledge management and getting things done in my days as International Czar for Lotus Development by David Gurteen.
In April 2005, BLU, the UK's Business Link University which no longer exists hired Fifty Lessons to produce a series of video stories for them to which I (David Gurteen) was invited to contribute. This is one of those stories.

Media Information:

Quotations are extremely effective at capturing and concisely communicating thoughts and ideas. They can be inspirational but more importantly quotations can help us reveal and assess the assumptions, values and beliefs that underlie the ways in which we perceive the world.

I have compiled over 800 quotations and short excerpts on this website. It is an eclectic mix but most of them are inspirational or insightful in nature and relate to knowledge, learning or personal development in some form.

If you love quotations as much as I do then you may wish to register to have a quote e-mailed to you once a week or more frequently by clicking on the button below and completing the form.

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you're life is just to live your life inside the world.

Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.

That's a very limited life.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem.

It turned out that getting fired by Apple was the best thing that could ever have happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Don’t settle [for less]. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma -- which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They some how already know what you truly want. Everything else is secondary.

If you are interested in Knowledge Management, the
Knowledge CafÚ
or the role of conversation in organizational life then you my be interested in this online book I am writing on
Conversational Leadership

David Gurteen

I help people to share their knowledge; to learn from each other; to innovate and to work together effectively to make a difference!

The Gurteen Knowledge Community is a global learning community
of over 21,000 people in 160 countries across the world.

The community is for people who are committed to making a difference:
people who wish to share and learn from each other and who strive to see
the world differently, think differently and act differently.